This collection contains materials on the topic of family violence from the DIVerse Families bibliography.

DIVerse Families is a comprehensive bibliography that demonstrates the growing diversity of families in the United States. This type of bibliography provides teachers, librarians, counselors, adoption agencies, children/young adults, and especially parents and grandparents needing to empower their children with materials that reflect their families.

What do you do when everybody says you're someone you're not? Alex wants change. Massive change. More radical than you could imagine. Her mother is not happy, in fact she's imploding. Her dad walked out. Alex has turned vegetarian, ditched one school, enrolled in another, thrown out her clothes. And created a new identity. An identity that changes her world. And Alex-the other Alex-has a lot to say about it. Alex As Well is a confronting and heartfelt story of adolescent experience of questioning identity, discovering sexuality, navigating friendships and finding a place to belong. Alex is a strong, vulnerable, confident, shy and determined character, one you will never forget.

When Adam Blake lands the best elective ever in his senior year, serving as an aide to the school psychologist, he thinks he's got it made. Sure, it means a lot of sitting around, which isn't easy for a guy with ADHD, but he can't complain, since he gets to spend the period texting all his friends. Then the doctor asks him to track down the troubled freshman who keeps dodging her, and Adam discovers that the boy is Julian; the foster brother he hasn't seen in five years.

Biracial Anna, 15, is a strong character in search of love & roots following sexual abuse & rejection from her own family. Caring for her two younger siblings after their unreliable mother abandons them, fifteen-year-old Anna discovers the difficulties of trying to be a parent.

To escape her father's abuse, Emily and her mother come to a shelter where they find a safe place to stay with other women and children in similar circumstances. At night, a little girl and her mother seek safety from an abusive daddy by going to a safe place, the white house on the hill.

The youngest of three siblings, fourteen-year-old Anke feels both relieved and neglected that her father abuses her brother and sister but ignores her, but when she catches him with one of her friends, she finally becomes angry enough to take action.

From Hida Viloria, writer and intersex activist, a candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of life, love, and gender identity as an intact intersex person, as well as a call to action for justice for intersex people. Hida Viloria was raised as a girl but discovered early on that he/r body was different. Unlike most people who are born intersex in the first world--meaning they have genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, and/or chromosomal patterns that do not fit standard definitions of male or female--Hida had the freedom to explore the person s/he was born to be because he/r parents did not agree to have he/r sex characteristics surgically altered at birth. It wasn't until s/he was 26 and encountered the term "intersex" in a San Francisco newspaper that s/he finally had a name for he/r difference. That's when s/he began to explore what it means to live in the space between genders--to be both and neither. As s/he began to reach out to others like he/r, however, Hida discovered that most intersex people had been scarred, both physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to "correct" their bodies. Eager to help end this practice, Hida came out as intersex at a national and then international level. By answering the question "Are you a boy or a girl?" with "I'm both," Hida's helped blaze a trail for people--particularly intersex and genderqueer/non-binary people--to celebrate the middle space where male and female are not separate and opposite but entwined. Born Both is an intimate and powerful account of Hida's search for authentic identity and love in a world that insists on categorizing people into either/or.

Dillon is living with the painful memory of his brother's suicide-and the role he played in it. To keep his mind and body occupied, he trains intensely for the Ironman triathlon. But outside of practice, his life seems to be falling apart. Then Dillon finds a confidante in Jennifer, a star high school basketball player who's hiding her own set of destructive secrets. Together, they must find the courage to confront their demons-before it's too late.

Randy wanted things to be the way they used to be, but her mother is dead, her father has remarried, they've moved to a new neighborhood and her first friend in it cuts her off for no reason that Randy can figure out.

Teenage Gerald, who has spent years protecting his fragile half-sister from their abusive father, faces the prospect of one final confrontation before the problem can be solved. When Gerald was a child he was fascinated by fire. But fire is dangerous and powerful, and tragedy strikes. His substance-addicted mother is taken from him. Then he loses the loving generosity of a favorite aunt. A brutal stepfather with a flaming temper and an evil secret makes his life miserable. The one bright light in Gerald's life is his little half sister, Angel, whom he struggles to protect from her father, Jordan Sparks, who abuses her, and from their mother, whose irresponsible behavior forces Gerald to work hard to keep the family together. As a teenager, Gerald finds success as a member of the Hazelwood Tigers basketball team, while Angel develops her talents as a dancer. Trouble still haunts them, however, and Gerald learns, painfully, that young friends can die and old enemies must be faced. In the end he must stand up to his stepfather alone in a blazing confrontation. Sharon M. Draper has interwoven characters and events from her previous novel, Tears of a Tiger, in this unflinchingly realistic portrayal of poverty and child abuse. It is an inspiring story of a young man who rises above the tragic circumstances of his life by drawing on the love and strength of family and friends

Through a hot, dry Oklahoma summer, twelve-year-old Franny tends wild animals brought by her neighbors, hears gossip during a weekly quilting bee, befriends a new neighbor who has some big secrets, and learns to hope.

Ghost. Lu. Patina. Sunny. Four kids from wildly different backgrounds with personalities that are explosive when they clash. But they are also four kids chosen for an elite middle school track team -- a team that could qualify them for the Junior Olympics if they can get their acts together. They all have a lot to lose, but they also have a lot to prove, not only to each other, but to themselves. Ghost has a crazy natural talent, but no formal training. If he can stay on track, literally and figuratively, he could be the best sprinter in the city. But Ghost has been running for the wrong reasons -- it all starting with running away from his father, who, when Ghost was a very little boy, chased him and his mother through their apartment, then down the street, with a loaded gun, aiming to kill. Since then, Ghost has been the one causing problems -- and running away from them -- until he meets Coach, an ex-Olympic Medalist who blew his own shot at success by using drugs, and who is determined to keep other kids from blowing their shots at life.

After the death of her parents, April Taylor flees north to take a job looking after Mrs. Westington's deaf granddaughter, Echo, until the arrival of the girl's mother and her drug-dealing boyfriend puts both girls' lives in deadly danger.

After years of abuse from his mother and neglect from his father, ninth-grader Sean Parker is headed for trouble until he is sent to do community service at a farm owned by an old man who teaches Sean that he can take control of his own life.

Each night two hoods ride a train to a wrecking yard on the outskirts of the city. Here, in this cemetery of stories, they are storytellers with the power to fast forward, pause and rewind. Tonight, they tell the story of three kids left in a car. Rewind. It’s Friday, KFC night and the last day of school before Christmas. Kyle, Jessie and baby brother Troy are waiting in the car for their mum. As night approaches the car park takes on a dark and sinister aspect filled with strange and familiar characters. The shopping centre closes, Mum still hasn’t returned and the baby won’t stop crying. Exploring issues of poverty and family violence, Hoods is a suburban tale of survival and solidarity against the odds.

In 1968, after the death of her beloved Gramps, Delores "Itch" Colchester and her grandmother move from Florida to an Ohio trailer park, where she meets new people and, when she learns that a friend is being abused by her mother, tries her best to emulate her plain-spoken grandfather.

It's the mid-1980s. Julia Scheeres and her adopted brother David are sixteen years old and have just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees and trailer parks, and a racism neither of them is prepared for. While Julia is white, her close relationship with David, who is black, makes them both outcasts. At home, a distant mother, more involved with her church's missionaries than with her own children, and a violent father only compound their problems. When high-school hormones, bullying, and a deep-seated restlessness prove too much to bear, they are packed off to a Christian boot camp in the Dominican Republic. Surrounded by natural beauty, the Escuela Caribe is governed by a disciplinary regime that demands its teens repent for their sins, which few of them are aware they've committed. How they made it through with heart and soul intact is told here with candor and humor.

Little Chicago opens in the office of Children's Services, where eleven-year-old Blacky Brown is being interviewed by a social worker who is trying to determine what has happened to him. At first, Blacky's emotions are blocked, but then he reveals that he has been sexually abused by his mother's boyfriend, and is released into his mother's custody. Thus begins an alternately harrowing and hopeful story of a brave boy's attempts to come to grips with a grim reality. Mary Jane, a classmate who is similarly ostracized, tries to help Blackie, but he soon takes refuge instead in the gun that he buys.

When eighteen-year-old Hunter Jackson and his half sister, Ashlin, return to their dad's for the first winter in years, they expect everything to be just like the warmer months they'd spent there as kids. And it is, at first. But Chance, the charismatic and adventurous boy who made their summers epic, is harboring deep secrets. Secrets that are quickly spiraling into something else entirely. The reason they've never met Chance's parents or seen his home is becoming clearer. And what the siblings used to think of as Chance's quirks-the outrageous stories, his clinginess, his dangerous impulsiveness-are now warning signs that something is seriously off. Then someone turns up with a bullet to the head, and all eyes shift to Chance's family. Hunter and Ashlin know Chance is innocent ... they just have to prove it. But how can they protect the boy they both love when they can't trust a word Chance says?

Eight-year-old Carrie Parker and her little sister, tired of living in an abusive environment, concoct a plan to run away, but their escape is thwarted by a shocking revelation that will change their lives.

The McCauleys look perfect on the outside. But nothing is ever as it seems, and this family is hiding a dark secret. Hadley McCauley will do anything to keep her sister safe from their father. But when Hadley's forbidden relationship with Charlie Simmons deepens, the violence at home escalates, culminating in an explosive accident that will leave everyone changed. When Hadley attempts to take her own life at the hospital post-accident, her friends, doctors, family, and the investigator on the case want to know why. Only Hadley knows what really happened that day, and she's not talking.